Mining equipment gets tough on downtime with Hardox® 600

LKAB’s experience with Hardox^® wear plate goes back several years. But recently, the company’s requirements for service life and more advanced solutions became more acute. They needed to unload higher volumes at LKAB’s biggest harbor in Narvik, Norway, which led to increased wear and fewer opportunities to perform maintenance. At the Narvik harbor, LKAB handles nearly 30 million tonnes of iron ore each year. The harbor is ice-free year round, and deep enough to accommodate ocean-going vessels.

That’s when Hardox^® 600 stepped in to handle the demands created by increased wear and longer maintenance intervals. Hardox^® 600 can withstand high impact, abrasion and pressure, making it ideal for extreme wear conditions. Hardox^® 600 can still be easily cut and welded, making it a great choice for high-performance applications. And it is extremely hard – not just on the surface, but throughout its entire thickness down to the core. This means that wear will not vary over time. “What we were looking for was a material which could maintain a uniform quality over a long service life,” says Evert Nilsfors from LKAB in Norway. “Hardox^® 600 has proved it can meet all our strictest requirements.”

The company decided to conduct a performance optimization project with SSAB. In mines, lifting massive volumes of material and withstanding the pummeling of hard or sharp rock puts nearly any machine under immense strain. Mining skips and transport equipment must be extremely rugged to maintain productivity. Also, the skip has to be designed to carry large, heavy loads without being too heavy itself. So, what materials are best for the job? Aluminum is commonly used because of its excellent strength to weight ratio. But it simply can’t take the heavy wear and tear. That’s why LKAB lined its skips with a high-strength AR steel, Hardox^® 600.